Children hear better than they see!

Monkeys Match the Number of Voices They Hear to the Number of Faces They See

Convergent evidence demonstrates that adult humans possess numerical representations that are independent of language [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6]. Human infants and nonhuman animals can also make purely numerical discriminations, implicating both developmental and evolutionary bases for adult humans' language-independent representations of number [7 and 8]. Recent evidence suggests that the nonverbal...

How Do Children Develop Syntactic Representations from What They Hear?

Children learn language from what they hear. In dispute is what mechanisms they bring to this task. Clearly some of these mechanisms have evolved to support the human speech capacity but this leaves a wide field of possibilities open. The question I will address in my paper is whether we need to postulate an innate syntactic module that has evolved to make the learning of language structure pos...

“Not See, Not Hear, Not Speak”: Preschoolers Think They Cannot Perceive or Address Others Without Reciprocity

Rhesus Monkeys See Who They Hear: Spontaneous Cross-Modal Memory for Familiar Conspecifics

Rhesus monkeys gather much of their knowledge of the social world through visual input and may preferentially represent this knowledge in the visual modality. Recognition of familiar faces is clearly advantageous, and the flexibility and utility of primate social memory would be greatly enhanced if visual memories could be accessed cross-modally either by visual or auditory stimulation. Such cr...

Radiologists remember mountains better than radiographs, or do they?

Expertise with encoding material has been shown to aid long-term memory for that material. It is not clear how relevant this expertise is for image memorability (e.g., radiologists' memory for radiographs), and how robust over time. In two studies, we tested scene memory using a standard long-term memory paradigm. One compared the performance of radiologists to naïve observers on two image sets...